I win every scar contest.

When drunken macho tell turns into proud show, I have a scar that runs for more than a foot from just below my ribs to below my hips. I can laugh it off, tell the story, win the beer, wear the bathing suit. It has been almost 15 years – it wavers between something I don’t see and something that is writ large on my psyche: an exclamation point on a body I love; a punctuation mark after survival.

It was only when they told me they had to put a metal rod in my leg that I cried. I begged the intern to make the scars as small as possible, to insert the fewest screws and stitch the smallest stitches. Summers of hard jobs and funny accidents have left me with corresponding scars all over – commas on my knuckles, ellipses on my clavicle, a purple semicolon on the bridge of my nose… but my legs? They were run on sentences. The last place, on the very things that let me travel from scar to scar in the first place.

One set of scars? That is one thing. One story, one beer, one triumph. Two pairs are the trump to vanity. They require two stories, too much wit and too much self deprecation to fit nicely onto a 5’2″ body paragraph. One brings the other into sharp focus; my frame unable to bury the lede anymore. They are badly placed and awkward, unedited and glaring grammatical errors.

The new scars are small. Inches over my knee, seven purple asterisks around my ankle and upper calf. They have faded and blurred already in the two months that I’ve avoided writing anything at all – anything more than a grocery list or a short email. One by one they are settling into their story line, and so, it seems, am I.

My body has taken a beating with the editor’s pen. But I’m still writing.

I bled the minutes out of my mexican cellphone across four airports – PVR, LAX, JFK, YHZ. Frantic, nicotine and shitty bathroom soap slick fingers stuttering out SMS SOS’s. “Just keep getting on planes,” she wrote, “Text me from the next stop.” Then the minutes were gone and the battery dead, and I was home.

“Maybe you just need to stay in one place for a little while… just stop…” she counselled as I relayed plans for more travel. If I kept moving, perhaps I could circle back on the poor life choices and trump them with new success.

One day and one hour later, I woke up in a hip to ankle cast.

So I’m staying in one place for a little while. Starting again. At the end.

(thanks to my dad, for reminding me in his own way that the end is just another beginning, and my mom, for telling me to keep writing.x)

(ps – how did I do this? It’s in the comments.)

]]> http://kemptlife.com/2012/05/11/the-only-place-to-start-again/feed/ 7 http://kemptlife.com/2011/12/30/arm-party/ http://kemptlife.com/2011/12/30/arm-party/#comments Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:04:49 +0000 Andrea http://kemptlife.com/?p=4861

{sadly, both my Minolta and my Canon AE-1 simultaneously have given up the ghost. Coupled with the fact I left my digital charger in Canada… I only have my iPhone.}

We’re going to do a picture by picture play by play of of the last two months lovelies, because frankly I’ve been avoiding blogging as the crush of all that’s happened precludes any great storytelling. It has become too unruly, too massive and detailed to relate in any cohesive or entertaining form. The smallest summary I could muster of the lead up and the move is here – this is the rest.

1) So we hit the road from Nova Scotia for a 10 day trial trip – 4 in LA, 6 in Mexico, to see if I wanted to make the move. 2) While this sign sounds positive, it only reminded me that prior to the 3) 5 hours of tattooing, I had slept for exactly 1 full hour the night previous. 4) LA was beautiful, crazy. We went to a Kings/Canucks Game, saw B.B. King and 5)drank a shit ton of coffee to keep us going. 6) We made it to our little town after one crazy last night in LA where I finally got the closest I managed to shopping – throwing up outside a Macy’s. The roosters here are the bane of my existence, their noise tempered only by the nights I indulge in 7) atomic sized margaritas, the first taste of tequila that I’ve had since an unfortunate event 12 years previous.8) I was offered an incredibly insane opportunity prompting me 9) to return home and 10) say many tearful goodbyes before 11)loading up on coffee, books and munchies for the trip back to Mexico. 12) What followed was a few days of R&R – beaches, fishing and sunshine, before starting 13) to meet farmers, suppliers, coworkers and 14)fishermen (yeah, my job is hard..). 15) All of this was supported and fostered by an amazing friendship and love that has never hesitated to push me, 16) take me out to dinner (Agua Chillie… my favorite dish here), 17) drive me around Jalisco and Nayarit for all kinds of 18) amazing supplies. And when it gets to be too much, or it just comes Christmas time, there is 19) shopping in Sayulita, 20) surf on Christmas day, and 21)  the best view I’ve seen on December 25th in a few years.

Which brings us to now. I promise it won’t be so long next time. xo

This is not boy meet girl.

I’m not sure what this is. Other than a giant leap, to a dream job in a wild place with a boy that has alternately held my hand and pushed me.

Ladies and gentlemen. Kempt is moving to Mexico.

{a handmade bed.}

{all taken on the new to me Canon AE-1 on Kodak Portra film}

And then I was home.

And it is exactly the same, but different. It has shifted – to a spare bedroom, to half a grocery bill, to sleeping alone. I’m now 180 degrees to the left of  together… And I’m ok.

These photos are so precious to me, they look like August felt. Warm, calm, filled with cold beer and gentle, kind friends, good food and slowly – laughter. Granted, it also contained a lot of drinking, swearing, crippling hangovers and definite liver damage – but I do not photograph well in the jaundiced light of potential cirrhosis.

So I am here. And I am ok, buoyed by your amazing words and your kindness. There is still incredible sadness here and there, and every once and awhile I still feel as though I was punched in the gut by a fistful of douchbaggery. But mostly? I am basking in the last of summer, and the first of another adventure.

I would like to say that the light and the revelations and the peace stayed with me. But the truth is when I boarded the ferry in Tarifa after frankly ecclesiastical flamenco and topless drinking with other itinerant travelers… I was well and truly alone for the first time. I attempted to convince myself that the feeling was merely seasickness.

Or train sick as I lay in my swaying bunk on the Marrakesh Express.

Or maybe just a bit of dodgy lamb in Mechui Alley, or the warm salty olives around Jemaa El Fna.

And then it all came up.

In the middle of the night, lost among the winding alleys and throngs of people, I parked myself between a rubbish pile and the mint vendor and I threw myself headlong into the sickness, the heartbreak, the vomit and bile and bruises. And I begged. I made that shitty phone call, and I begged. I begged for him, for us, for our life, for the goodness, for the shit. Fuck, I begged on the basis of the tedious nature of simply dividing our dishes. I begged. Sitting in the rubbish, in the din of thousands of people eating and drinking and laughing and talking, I sat in garbage and begged a man to be with me. I was that sick, heartbroken girl.

Somewhere it is written that a heart nears a terminal density when paying 50$ a minute for icy silence.  However, it is intrinsically known and unstated  that it shatters audibly over a crackling cellphone line with the utterance of single word.

“No.”

And in the shit and the mint and the sudden, deafening silence that precedes all defining moments, I vomited all over myself, and I started again. Because the heart is a muscle, and sometimes only in breaking that motherfucker do you really make it stronger.

To strength my loves.

{more photos of Morrocco here}

The number of times I have tried to write this post is embarrassing. That it is no better than the other 100 times I have written it does not help. There is no perfect photo to go with the perfect story, no metaphor or simile or wittism that can be unpacked and untangled and perfected to say what most of these photos already do: that it was good, and bright, stunningly beautiful and delicious and soul wrenching and so .. so fucking hard. And so fucking dark.

I was not cool or collected or demure, and I cried with all the style and grace of a paper bag filled with hot soup. That shit was everywhere. I cried in train washrooms, I cried in my wine, I cried in churches and I cried in the shower. I cried while shovelling squid in my face, and I cried when I stepped into the Mediterranean. I was heartbroken. It was dark. And sad. And I cried.

And then I cried a little less.

And a little less.

Though it was still hard. And it was still dark.

Until one day we were standing in a cathedral in the hushed, ethereal light crafted from math, angles, glass and faith; when I saw tears in her eyes.  And we marveled together at the beauty of hundreds of people who have paid their euros not for science or technology but to simply to stand and marvel at that light, and the strange and stunning circumstances that had brought us there together to do the same.

And it may not have been any easier. But it was a little lighter.

{all photos taken with the Pentax K1000, these were shot on Fuji Superia 400 expired film. See more here.}